This academic year has been a rewarding one for us all, as we’ve found a renewed cadence while continuing to provide our students with the best possible educational experience. We ended the 2022-2023 school year with a momentous commencement celebrating nearly 1,500 undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students who earned their degrees.

As the ninth-best undergraduate program and seventh-best graduate program in the U.S., the Cockrell School of Engineering continues to be ranked amongst the top schools. We remain dedicated to building a strong and supportive community for our engineering students — a community fostered by a diverse group of dedicated professors who care deeply about our student’s success and well-being. We strive to create an environment that encourages innovation, critical thinking and problem-solving skills through world-class, state-of-the-art facilities.

A major project for next year includes developing the Engineering Discovery Building (EDB) which will serve as the new home for chemical and petroleum engineering. The EDB will provide advanced teaching facilities for student experiential learning and world-class labs for faculty and graduate student research.

We are also embarking on a major renovation of the Microelectronics Research Center at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus. This will help ensure the continued leadership of the Cockrell School in microelectronics and semiconductor manufacturing.

We remain committed to seeking out and securing funding that makes education more affordable. This past spring, we launched the Linford Scholars program, which increases access to engineering education for Pell Grant-eligible students. This generous gift from Cockrell School alumnus Michael and his wife Erika Linford enabled more than 80 students to receive scholarships this year.

We continue to strengthen our partnerships with across various industry sectors. These ensure our students have access to gaining practical experience addressing real-world challenges. They also enable our expert faculty to reciprocate their knowledge back into the corporate world. This spring, we launched the  UT Austin-Amazon Science Hub, the sixth such alliance between the tech company and a leading university. It aims to advance research that prompts new discoveries, addresses significant challenges and creates solutions that benefit society.

Moreover, we are expanding our curriculum to include emerging areas of engineering such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and sustainable energy systems. These are exciting fields that hold immense innovation potential, and we are eager to equip our students with the skills and knowledge needed to thrive in these domains.

In this year’s magazine, you will see the incredible efforts our faculty, staff and students have put in to maintain our position as a top engineering school, whether that’s keeping labs up and running during trying times, creating new organizations to give students a sense of community, or developing research solutions to pressing global challenges. You’ll learn about our world-class work in batteries, our push to become a hub of a new space startup ecosystem in Texas and the outstanding highlights of last year.

Many of our initiatives and successful program are thanks to your continued support, and I truly appreciate it.

I hope you enjoy this year’s magazine.

Sincerely,

Roger T. Bonnecaze
Dean
Jack and Beverly Randall Dean’s Chair for Excellence in Engineering